Abstract:
This document is the final project report for a final year project in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, module code BPJ 420.
Company ABC is a company that started out as a family-owned business in 1993. Despite an annual growth of 21% for the last three years, a recent survey showed deterioration in customer service. As customer satisfaction is vital to sustainable growth of the company, the underlining problems to poor customer service are identified and quantified in the project motivation and problem analysis.
Business process management (BPM) is identified as an appropriate theoretical area in industrial engineering to deal with the process inefficiencies causing the decline in customer service. Information system design (ISD), operations research (OR) and the quick changeover philosophy single minute exchange of die (SMED) are identified to semi-automate and optimise some of the processes within the company to enhance customer service.
A literature study is done on the above mentioned theoretical contexts and their corresponding project approaches. Problem analysis is done using the drivers and triggers for a BPM related project identified in the literature study, as well as the PIECES analysis used to identify information system (IS) related projects.
The requirements elicitation is done, where the appropriate strategy with its process architecture is developed with initial BPMN process models and the basic enterprise construction. Corporate strategy is developed using strategic analysis tools, like PESTEL analysis, Porter’s five forces and value disciplines. The balanced scorecard approach is used to identify appropriate measures for the chosen strategy.
The requirements serve as a foundation for the solution selection where a cost-benefit analysis indicates that implementing the new business processes, especially those involving the IS and SMED, could potentially increase the overall quote acceptance rate by 20% and reduce costs by R 411 550.00 annually.
BPMN and SMED are used to construct the new process models in the solution construction. These process models are developed with corresponding training manuals for the expanded IS, role descriptions with specific KPIs and customer communication scripts.
The implementation approach is discussed with some findings as conclusion. Since the evaluation results were obtained only a month after implementation, some of the expected long-term benefits have not been fully realised. The company did however experience an immediate 28.9% growth in revenue from the corresponding month of the previous year with further benefits discussed in the conclusion and recommendations.
